Dollar Shave Club and the Disruption of Everything
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
These words, they are not what is happening.
Value is the thing the shaver gets from having a razor. P&G doesn't get any value from giving you a razor, that's why you have to pay money to get them to do it. You have to transfer some of the value you get back to them in cash form.
If razors now cost 25% of what they used to, there is still exactly the same amount of value in existence. There are the same number of razors and the same number of dollars, only now more of the dollars stay with the customer. Probably there is more total value because at a lower price people will buy more of the thing.
This may be more easily confusing because we have become used to measuring the economy by stock prices. But stock prices are a measure of the inefficiency in the economy. They're a measure of the return on capital. The amount more that companies skim off the top between what the customer pays and what was necessary to produce it.
A company that makes products for $5 and sells them for $5 may have a negligible stock price while creating an enormous amount of value. A company that buys products for $1 and sells them unchanged for $10 may have a high stock price while creating no value at all.
You also have to remember the subscription model that these razors run under. Gillette will happily give you a shaving handle + 1-2 cartridges for free, the theory being you are then locked into their system. Thus "value" is created for them, on expectations of future revenue.
Gillette has not 'created value' when it made a razor blade, only created the potential for value which is then crystallized when a consumer buys the item with the intent to use it.
Similarly, a consumer who buys a razor blade has not created value at the time of transaction, but actually accrues value over time as it is used.
As you imply, it might be better to think of it as a shift of value from the producer to the consumer.
The internet is doing this all over the place (just ask the newspapers--plenty of the value they captured before the 1990s shifted to other outlets, and eventually into the consumer's pockets). The auto did this, every important technology does this.
When prices go down, people buy more razors. What does this mean? It most likely means that people get to shave with sharper blades, as it's now worth it for them to buy fresh ones and not use an old one.
I'm sure there's a name for that somewhere on The Innovator Dilemma, and if somebody finds it I'll gladly change my usage. But yes, calling it "value destruction" is stupid.
Anyway, It does not change anything on the overall idea, but your last paragraph is not really correct. If the company added no value at all, it wouldn't be able to sell the product. It may add value in distribution (yes, there is such a thing), or even just branding, but it better add more value than the price of the product, otherwise, people just won't pay.
Still, that's a secondary effect brought on by the "Market Destruction" as you say.
When trepanation went out of style, it destroyed the market for skull-drills, and destroyed the market for hole-in-skill-drilling service providers. While you can argue that there was value to the consumer in not having a hold drilled in their head, it was still a net loss to any shareholders in companies that provided trepanation products and services.
If doing something people want creates a market, value went up. If doing something people want destroyed a market, value went up.
If you destroy a market by bribing a government and prohibiting a product people want, value went down.
You're not destroying the market either. You're making the market bigger, because at lower prices there is usually more volume. What you're destroying is margins, but that's generally considered good by anyone other than the party whose margins they are.
> If the company added no value at all, it wouldn't be able to sell the product.
It depends how far you're willing to stretch the notion of value. It's possible that you can sell $1 items for $10 because you've paid off the government or are in bed with the Mafia and anyone who tries to compete with you gets thrown in jail or has their shop burned down, but it requires a strange notion of value creation to call it that.
And this happens to a lesser or greater degree every time a corporation buys a law.
Making a market bigger by reducing prices is something completely different. It also goes by the same "disruption" name. That's why I started using that term.
About that second line, yes, any kind of coercion is an exception.
Sure, it probably only grew a little, e.g. because of a few people who used to use blades past when they were dull and now replace them sooner. But not growing very much (or even not at all) is not being destroyed. It's the margins that are destroyed, not the market.
> About that second line, yes, any kind of coercion is an exception.
The trouble is, for high margin businesses, it's the rule rather than the exception.
For example, we could consider electric razors, disposable razors, and replaceable head razors as three separate markets. They are substitute goods, so as the price for replaceable head razors fall that market grows. In response the market for electric razors and and disposable razors contract.
Think about the two extremes: If taxes are 100% - the business goes under and everyone loses their jobs, suppliers lose a customer, customers lose a product they liked and shareholders lose everything.
If taxes are 0%, the business grows - shares become more valuable, the demand (and therefore price) for employees and suppliers increases, and customers will pay less.
The naivety of your second paragraph suggests you think business is not operating in its own best interest. How does employee and supplier costs going up = consumer cost going down? There seem to be huge leaps being made here.
Corporate tax policy and supply/demand economics is probably too complex to try to boil down to a a short paragraph each.
Likewise, I can volunteer my labour to build houses for the homeless, clean up a park... Since I wasn't remunerated for it, does that mean I didn't create any value?
Since the article was discussing a specific industry and company, and the OP responded by the incentives of companies, I figured it was safe to assume that the discussion did not involve coercion or charitable actions as they are very different actions with different reward structures. Within a marketplace for commodities, an actor is rewarded with profits for providing goods or services.
Mugging would be coercion, and doesn't seem to fit within the context. Charitable actions can obviously create and transfer value, but it also seems outside the scope of a discussion of commoditization of goods.
This part isn't true. If you take inputs and combine them into something the market values more than the uncombined inputs, the process of combining them creates value, regardless of what price tag you put on the end product. The question then is who gets the value you created. If there is very little competition among producers, you might be able to charge a price well above your cost and keep most of the value for yourself in the form of profit (the buyers will still get some of it or they won't buy). If there is brutal competition, you might have to sell at cost just to avoid losing money from fixed costs (ex: property tax) that would have to be paid even if you sold nothing. If you combine the inputs into something the consumer values more than those inputs but charge the consumer the cost of the inputs, you DO create value by combining the inputs and ALL of the value you create goes to the consumer.
Profit isn't inefficiency, it is the incentive to remove inefficiency.
This part IS true. Profit is an (if not "the") incentive to remove inefficiency, though profit is not an inevitable consequence of removing inefficiency. If your competitors also remove the inefficiency, the extra value may not stay with the producers in the form of profit but go to the buyers.
You're very right that increased competition could lead to losses. However, this is a short term destabilization with a maximum duration of capital reserves. It is the net profit of the firm that determines it's long term viability.
What about for-profit companies that convert some of their software over to open source? Does that stop generating value when it goes free?
And what about Comcast? They "earn" great profits, and they aren't dependent on state granted monopoly, regulated as a common carrier etc. But they'd create a lot more value as a utility with much lower profits.
Let's see if I can rephrase this: A company that is unable to generate a profit long-term has proven incapable of creating value for all stakeholders. So a company may be able to sell a product with a margin, but if that margin is not enough to compensate labor, landlords, supply chain, shareholders, etc; the the net value creation is negative. So a company that is not generating a profit is not creating value, but one cannot measure the amount of value created by just measuring profit.
Open Source: I think that the incentives and economics of open source get pretty complex. There are multiple reasons for a company to open source their code, but I think it's pretty safe to say that companies are not in the habit of open sourcing valuable trade secrets. Two ways a company can realize more value by open sourcing are 1) utilize "unpaid" labor (contributors are not paid by the company, but presumably are compensated through some other means) and 2) recruitment and PR boost (by open sourcing projects, the company has improved reputation giving it leverage in hiring and other practices). So, to answer your question, open sourcing code restructures the value calculation. Presumably, an open source project that provides no value is an orphaned project.
Comcast is a beneficiary of monopoly provisions. In order to incentivize the creation of infrastructure, telecoms were granted monopolies. For example, I can only purchase Comcast cable, not TimeWarner or any other provider. I suspect that your point is correct as regulating ISPs like utilities could decrease rent-seeking actions by the ISP. In this scenario, lower margins would generate more value (shareholders realize lower value but consumers realize greater value in the form of decreased prices). Rent seeking, like coercion, is a sign of a market failure.
Thanks for the response!
The high cost that is not profit, is inefficiency: Paying someone to do work is inefficient not because it costs money, but because the person had to do the work -- it would be more efficient if the work product could be created with less work.
(Compare cost of labor to cost of scarcity: It's not efficient to buy/sell a diamond -- diamond seller is very happy to sell their scarce good for very little work. The coal seller is less happy -- they have to do a lot more work to earn their revenue.)
Economic profit is friction. If you replaced the profit-taking entity with one that performed the same function but took half as much profit then more surplus-generating transactions would take place.
Which means there is more work being done for the same result, because e.g. the higher price causes the customer to spend twelve hours fixing his own car instead of paying an experienced mechanic who could have done it in six.
No, value is the $35 that P&G gets for selling a $5 razor blade pack for $40. It's the difference between perceived value vs. commodity value.
By milking the Gilette cow a little too much, P&G created an absurd situation where razors were just ridiculous. That made the market ripe for new entrants who used marketing efficiencies to hock a similar, though inferior product at a "really high" vs "ridiculously high" margin.
A company that comes in and produces that same $5 product for $1 and sells it for $4 is creating far more value, both for its owners and its customers.
Economists have tended to shy away from trying to measure use value. However they are forced by actual events to talk about increases in "consumer surplus" which is effectively defined by the increase in use value per dollar, or alternative decline in dollars per unit of use value.
More generally the problem isn't just that "we have become used to measuring the economy by stock prices." The problem is that we've only ever agreed on ways to measure the economy that depend on money.
However money as a measure of the economy becomes less and less useful. Productivity increases are measured in % per year -- which implies productivity is on an exponential curve. And as productivity tends toward infinity, exchange value and profit tend toward zero. We'd better get a handle on use value, otherwise we won't be able to measure much at all.
Start looking for "real stuff" you can improve with tech, rather than just software/apps that're hard to defend.
aka what technological progress has been doing since the very beginning.
From your comment, it seems you'd agree ('incremental improvements').
In the dot-com days most programmers thought everything had a computer solution.
With the big jump with people learning to code and being able to build stuff themselves that they started looking and finding opportunities. Back then it was only a few million eyes and few hundred thousand with millions, now a days it's a few hundred million eyes and $100.
It'll only get worse with inflation. You have to compete 1.5x harder than 20 years before to keep up, so really you have to compete 2x harder to be ahead.
Looking for "real stuff" to improve with tech is so 2014, when everyone was pitching the Uber for X or Birchbox for X.
Here's a fun thought experiment: with "real stuff" comes real unit economics, meaning without magical exponential growth of low marginal costs of software to pad $250k comp packs for developers that means software developers and engineers in the middle are going to see their comp package normalize then drop.
I honestly don't think it wise to go into any industry where you lack any kind of domain experience. Turbo Tax is mostly about accounting and tax law, not software development.
I get what you're saying, but while developing software to handle "real stuff" might be more risky and more difficult, it's also going to have some real value.
Also, I don't see how anyone could ever do anything without going into an industry without domain experience. How else will you gain experience?
To that end, I often recommend that developers go and find jobs outside of traditional software businesses for a while. If you spend a few years writing code for a publishing house or an oil company you'll see more of the challenges that affect those businesses that you can apply software to. If you spend your entire career working in a software company it's unlikely you'll realise that these problems exist because (generally speaking) software companies have already realised they're a problem and addressed them.
Also to say no apps or games will be able to hit it big... Well, just look at Pokémon Go.
The reason it worked is because Pokemon itself is about traveling to different places and finding rare pokemons. That's literally the app - there is 100% congruence.
I think it also helps that Pokemon GO simplified the experience from Ingress which makes it more accessible to a wider variety of people.
Side projects.
Finding a co-founder/business partner with deep experience in the industry. (Worked for me.)
They all have had very different outlooks on the world.
The flooring industry is another place that might be ripe for "disruption", the software often sucks.
Actually anything in the building industry is ripe for disruption. I've worked with architects and every single firm has a different way of handling documents and change order requests.
There's actually a TON of companies that still use paper trails for change order requests. Some use dropbox, some use SFDC (salesforce.com), some use some archaic cloud storage solutions. It's literally all over the map. And every time one of my firms works with a new sub-contractor then they have to try and sync up how they all handle their project documents - its insane.
If someone developed a decent documents management company, based in the cloud, and integrated it with some nice mobile solutions, they would take a HUGE chunk of the market. I mean, think of how many companies are involved designing and building a house.
Not necessarily. Convincing people to fit their workflow into your new software, effectively running their companies around it, is not as easy as it sounds. Coding it is not the hard part.
Truer words have never been said. Selling your vision/workflow/business structure/data presentation is the hard part. Many of the things one may code as a solution will directly and negatively effect the job security of the exact person your are selling to, but that is the challenge. The secondary effect is a chilling of innovation by limiting the automation gains/improvements in some way to limit the impact of value depreciation of current workers.
I ran into a client where they preferred their home-grown Perl script to our million-dollar solution because grep searches faster than we do, even though we have literally a billion more features.
It's not just a challenge with your startup trying to get name recognition. It's a challenge for the major players, too. Inertia is hard to overcome.
Did they need any of those features, or did they need to search?
Yep, they're already on it: https://www.procore.com/
After working on it for past 9 years I can say that the software might looks very simple on the outside, but then you find a lots of proprietary data that are really hard to get (say the information how many man-hours will take laying down the some kind of roof using some type of technology process) and some partnership that will make it quite hard do as an outsider.
I am not saying the disruption is impossible, but it could be very hard and just a better software itself will not help.
The app was helpful for Uber, definitely. But moreso, was the change in the way they handled service: ratings, payment, hailing, etc. The app just facilitated those changes.
I think there's a lot of "we need an app" thinking in the industry, but no thought as to what that app will do.
http://reactionwheel.net/2015/10/the-deployment-age.html
We're headed into a deployment age w/r/t the internet, where bigger companies roll out solutions funded internally.
I thought the same when I read AWS in the article.
Linode, Slicehost, Rackspace, and other good hosts have been around way before AWS and offer very good VPS services that one can scale with ease. Auto scaling is not unique to Amazon. It isn't a cloud thing either. One could scale quite flexibly for at least 20 years now.
Unfortunately all the misinformed boot camp coding hipsters don't know their history but love to be plenty opinionated about technology as an artistic movement. And you get these wide reaching grabs for whimsical awe, full of misinformation.
Dollar Shave Club was nothing but a marketing success. The tech has absolutely nothing to do with it. Cute narrative attempt, I guess.
EC2 was game changing for certain reasons but what you mention sbout 'enterprise' was never an issue.
Edit: other guy beat me to this. Either way I agree that AWS wasn't integral to DSC's success.
Is this not how it usually plays out?
I suspect what he meant was that it's not a site that requires or makes use of any client side wizardry. Even if it does, it certainly doesn't need to - it's a web fronted database; a CRUD app.
The author's point about AWS was not really well articulated, but the above is his main point. All that's "changed" is the distribution model for retail - also known as E-Commerce.
I think that is the key here, Internet media helped them disseminate their message very rapidly.
I would also argue, easy access to capital was very important. Once that original video went viral, they had to really pour on the online ad-spend to acquire customers. Seeing as how their customer acquisition costs are high, the more customers they got, the more money they lost every month! Capital is key!
They were wildly successful before they were on AWS. I believe they started off on magento, then drupal before writing their own software (once they were having a lot of success).
They don't use Amazon for fulfillment. They used some other 3PL's and are now leasing and running their own distribution centers. In the beginning, Dubin was packing those razors up in his living room!
Source: founder a close personal friend.
You don't need billboards, flyers or TV ads to drive awareness, you can leverage free and paid marketing channels to build your business without burning loads of cash. Marketing today is less about budgets but more about how you can effectively execute on various parts of digital marketing - social media, content, paid ads and SEO. I can guess it will be a big win for consumers in the upcoming years; not so sure about incumbents.
I am not so sure it will be a win for consumers once most available content will be biased ("sponsored") by BigBrand money. To prevent such nightmare we need laws to force some kind of transparency on sponsored content.
This is pretty much the textbook definition of disruptive innovation.
If the products differ only in quality and price, that's not disruption, that's simple competition.
If the product is "pizza", then of course they are the same product.
Lay out a salami pizza from a restaurant, supermarket and delivery next to each other on plates and they will (mainly) differ only in quality and price.
- Atmosphere
- Service
- No effort
Supermarket:
- Convenience
- Have to cook and serve yourself
- Independent of time, have it whenever you want
Delivery
- Service without moving location
I think it is obvious that we (including the other participants in the thread) have vastly different points of view on this topic.
To me, the "pizza" example is simply about the end result: what you shove in your mouth.
To the other participants, the pizza is much more than that. For example, you mentioned "atmosphere" with restaurant pizza. To me, that has nothing to do with the pizza; the dining experience is an entirely different product itself (a service), and applies to various non-pizza dishes as well.
To emphasize why I believe this, and as food for thought (no pun intended), here in Austria, virtually all pizza delivery services are operated by pizzerias. In other words, in this particular case, the restaurant pizza and the delivery pizza would be identical. The difference would lie only in the mode in which you acquire the pizza -- the service product.
While I obviously still favor my point of view, I can also understand why you favor yours.
In all other aspects they are actually better. There is no proprietary cartridge handle, they last quite a long time and the best part is that they are very cheap.
Realistically, this is about breaking a monopoly thanks to easy consumer outreach.
I think there are two disrupters here, DSC applied a different business model and distribution model to razors and blades. Dorco, possibly because of DSC money, showed that they can mass produce good enough blades in multi-blade cartridges cheaper than Gillette, who builds billion dollar machines to manufacture them. If blade count is "better" then Dorco is on par or better. If it's the coatings and springs and the whole package then maybe Dorco is merely good enough. Either way, Dorco is able to compete at a quarter of the cost and that seems disruptive.
DSC found a great partner though, that has been key. I suspect Gillette has oversold their innovation too.
I do wonder how much Gillette oversold their innovation, or at least made advances that could be copied just by looking at their product. They certainly seem to have been throwing a lot of R&D at near-zero returns on actual quality.
Gillette doesn't do direct sales so it misses out on subs. It must rely on retailers to execute subs. If Gillette did subs for $10 they could greatly impact their "base" dynamics, essentially: low churn, consumer inertia, recurring and predictable revenues, direct channel to consumer for marketing and cross/up sells, streamlined billing, etc.
"Club" has been used to describe subscription products for as long as I can remember. Columbia House/BMG's mail order CD business were called record clubs, for example. There was (is?) also the Book of the Month Club and plenty of other "X of the month" clubs that probably existed way before the world wide web.
Perhaps "joining a club" sounds more positive/marketable than "subscribing to a mail order service."
The sale is a win for investors if they ended up with a good ROI. The article says the DSC brand cost $57m, but I've frequently seen numbers closer to $200m.
DSC alone may not have lasted, but if it has access to Unilever's product lines and resources, it can move beyond razors.
But after trying most of their razor models for months, they were far worse than even the Mach 3 razors I had. It was painful to shave with them, the handles had a bad design, the lubrication strips weren't working, etc. Maybe they're better now, but I get several months (or more) out of Mach 3 razor cartridges. I don't pay much at all for them and have little incentive to switch.
However, be careful: if you're not used to using a double-edged safety razor, it has a high learning curve. You'll probably cut yourself when you're first learning. Read online tutorials about how to do it right, and very importantly, don't be in a hurry. Once you've gotten the hang of it (after a month or so), it's pretty easy, but it does take time to learn the proper technique.
Finally, I spent about $40 on a nice stainless steel safety razor and 100 blades for $11 on Amazon. Each blade lasts me probably 2-3 weeks of shaving every other day. It's a bit more time consuming and it takes a little practice at first to keep from getting nicked, but it's worth it in the long run. I find it sort of funny that I'm most satisfied with one of the oldest, simplest, and cost effective shaving systems.
I bought a Braun Clean n Charge 7000 series back in 1999 or whenever they first came out, it was $200. I loved the thing. It lasted me over 10 years. When the battery pack finally wore out, (after trying and failing to replace the cells), I threw it out. I was feeling frugal, and compared the various Braun CnC models and couldn't understand why the top-end 700 series was so much more expensive than the 300 series which seemed to have all the same important 'features'. Sure, it lacked the fancy LCD and some of those touches, but I figured it would shave just as well, and for $100 less. (IIRC it was around 80-100$ for the 300 series and close to $200 still for the top-end 700 series).
I used the 300 series (I think a 370cc) for over a year and hated every minute of it. Finally I wised up, cut my losses, chucked it, and spent the damn-near $200 for the 700 series.
The 700 is made in Germany vs Mexico for the 300. The 700 is heavier. The materials feel better. It looks nicer. The motor feels like it runs twice as fast.
Moral of the story, you get what you pay for.
It's cheaper to purchase a manual and you gain more control, but the average person will lose convenience and speed. It takes practice.
Two months ago I tried switching from the Gillette Fusion Manual to what they call The Executive (6 blade inc. nose/sideburn trimmer). It was approximately a $1 cost saving per blade relative to Gillette on Amazon (both buying in bulk).
As you quite correctly said, the lubrication strips are simply terrible. It felt like using a really old Fusion blade where the lubrication strip had worn away, and razor burn increased noticeably. No cuts or nicks from either one, just discomfort.
The nose/sideburn back trimmer was also terrible. I use it regularly on the Fusion to, uhh, get under my nose and straighten my sideburns. On The Executive it felt like using a cheap disposable own brand blade.
I also want to mention the poor blade casing. On the Gillettes there is a gap between blades allowing the waste to easily escape, they clog a little but not much. The DSC's Executive had the blades much closer together, which caused waste to clog between the blades and it needed to be washed out frequently.
I wanted to like DSC's offerings. I wanted to switch. But after trying two The Executive blades, I've now switched back to Gillette. I'll happily give DSC another shot, but improvements have to be made.
The beauty is that the big players are structurally unable to compete, because they have baked in a high cost structure and are dedicated to serving ever-higher customer needs (think five blades).
Also, there must be quite a lot of ad agencies up and down Madison Ave laughing out loud because in their monthly pitch sessions to P&G they must have offered something similar to DSC on a silver platter for much less than a billion dollars.
IMHO, DSC model (subscription based company directly owning supplier to consumer chain, offering nice price + convencience) is the way to disrupt incumbents in consumer goods even though they will never get as big or as strong. there are lots of products which we do not care which brand we purchase as long as a certain level of quality and on-time sufficient delivery is ensured. i would definitely subscribe to a service which analyzes my consumption and delivers all "non-critical" products to my home/work location.
You're thinking of Harrys, they raised money to buy up a German razor factory to do a full stack business.
You're also really thinking about house brands that your local Walmart offers that plenty of people already buy.
Walmart on a subscription model already happens, they get sales upticks every payday or welfare disbursement days.
Amazon's CPG division is also building up heat. Their house brand is swallowing up category after categories from the Alibaba to Amazon guys.
Isn't this called Flipkart?
/joke
For an Apple customer switching to the Apple version of DSC, first they're probably dropping a significant chunk of money to switch. Yes, the Apple-DSC will be cheaper, but phones aren't a consumable product the way razors are, so there's also the possibility of just spending nothing and keeping your current Apple phone. Then if you do make the switch, you lose all your apps, you lose the ability to iMessage and FaceTime your friends, you lose easy access to your iCloud photos and notes, and more.
https://www.dollarshaveclub.com/page/checkout/product/4-blad... http://www.dorcousa.com/pace-4-cartridges-fra1040/
2012: $3.50
2013: $4.50
2014: $5.50
2016: $6.50
https://web.archive.org/web/20111103235102/http://www.dorcou...
http://lifehacker.com/5903771/forget-dollar-shave-clubbuy-th...
> That worked as long as P&G’s other advantages in technical superiority, advertising, and distribution held, but were they ever to falter, it was eminently viable to sell cartridges for less and still make a healthy margin.
For Dollar Shave Club there was no real technical superiority, and AWS disrupted the distribution. Is drafting off of others' technical innovations replicable? Sure, but you're not alone. AWS is a resource now available to almost anyone. Are "viral videos" replicable? Hardly. DSC hasn't even managed it themselves.
Until someone disrupts creative direction then the kind of disruption referred to in this article is a long ways off.
Because you can start to question how ads work, and if big companies are just wasting that money to maintain the "classic" media system.
Nickle shave club.
DSC is a mediocre brand that primarily resells a crappy product at cost.
A somewhat funny video and a mailing list are now worth a billion dollars?
That number is staggering. How can that possibly be right?
- artistic renderings - engineering diagrams - material choices - marketing research - prototypes - test groups - safety inspections - more prototypes - supply chain gear-up - packaging decisions - artwork - translations - international marketing research - factory conversion - tooling, dies and stamps - training - safety inspections - package production lines - advertising campaigns - distribution tuning
and then Gillette can start producing and selling them.
By comparison, DSC picked a manufacturer, asked them for some tweaks, and set up a fulfillment and reshipment operation.
So what fraction of shavers use Dollar Shave Club versus Gilette?
> ...leading to Dollar Shave Club capturing 15% of U.S. cartridge share last year.
Seems like a pretty good proxy for customers. Astonishing, I'd only vaguely heard of them.
Why not just compare actual user metrics? I guess it's hard to figure out how many people actually use a store-bought razor; not as hard in the online world (though it may be proprietary information to DSC).
Indeed! By that (disputable) metric, it's 9 times too small: 57/100*16=9.2
My skin and facial hair suck. The only razors I can shave with comfortably are Gillette Fusions. I know that they're incredibly overpriced, but the big package from Costco lasts me a year. I still get some mild irritation occasionally (even on the first shave with a fresh cartridge). I'm considering some form of permanent removal for my facial hair because it looks terrible and I will never grow it out under any circumstances.